Share with your CHRO
True Balance, a fintech platform operating across group entities with roughly 400 employees, built six HR systems from scratch rather than buying commercial software, and the economics are worth examining. Gaurav Sharma, the company’s CHRO, lays out the case: annual licensing costs for comparable off-the-shelf platforms would have run Rs 50-70 lakh (approximately $60,000-84,000 USD), while AI-assisted development compressed build timelines from months to weeks. The resulting in-house stack covers performance management, travel approvals, ESOP administration, hiring workflows, financial approvals, and an HR policy chatbot, collectively recovering over 3,000 person-hours annually.
What this means for your business
The build-versus-buy calculus just shifted, and it shifted faster than most HR technology budgets have caught up with. For years the decision was asymmetric: vendors had the engineering capacity and you didn’t, so you paid a premium for “good enough” and customized around the edges. AI-assisted development collapses that asymmetry for organizations below a certain complexity threshold, and 400 employees with clearly defined workflows is squarely in that zone. If your organization is larger or more regulated, the calculus is different, but the directional pressure is the same: the cost of building a narrow, process-specific tool keeps falling.
The piece is written by a CHRO making a case for his own decisions, which means the framing leans toward the wins and skips the failure modes. Specifically, the article never prices the ongoing engineering cost, the opportunity cost of internal talent maintaining six custom systems, or the risk of technical debt accumulating as the company scales past 400 people. The Rs 50-70 lakh savings figure is real, but it only holds if maintenance, security patching, and future feature development stay cheap. That assumption deserves scrutiny before any HR leader treats this as a template.
The sharper insight buried in the piece is process clarity as the actual competitive input. Sharma writes that “the real challenge is no longer engineering capability but process clarity,” and that claim holds whether you build or buy. Organizations whose HR processes are loosely defined or politically contested will get worse outcomes from custom builds than from vendor-imposed structure that forces a decision. The question a CHRO should be asking right now isn’t “should we build?” but “can we specify our processes precisely enough that a system, any system, could execute them without constant human correction?” If the answer is no, the build path will expose exactly what the buy path was hiding.
Concept deep-dive: ESOP Dashboard
An ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) dashboard is a self-service interface that lets employees view the current value of their equity, track vesting schedules (the timetable on which shares become theirs to keep or exercise), and see the history of any shares they’ve already exercised. Automating this matters because manual ESOP administration, typically spreadsheets and scheduled HR emails, creates both governance risk and employee trust problems when numbers don’t reconcile on the day an employee decides to leave.
Based on reporting from Building In-House HR Technology: The True Balance Advantage, ETHRWorld, originally published 2026-07-29 02:53:00.
